Chris Limbach studied Fluid Dynamics at the faculty of Civil Engineering at Delft University and earned his MBA from the University of Chicago. He began his career as a trader at Optiver, a Dutch proprietary trading firm, in Amsterdam and later in Chicago. In 2008, he moved to PGGM, a Dutch asset manager for pension funds in the healthcare and social work sector with AUM exceeding € 100 billion, and was appointed Head of Investments of the Quantitative Strategies team in 2009. The Quantitative Strategies portfolio invests in alternative risk premiums, such as volatility, correlation, momentum and liquidity using an absolute return benchmark. Chris Limbach is also responsible for setting up the Strategic Tail Risk Management program at PGGM.

A quant at Citi has revived debate about the changing nature of the profession (www.risk.net/2417747). The scope is narrower, he claims; the job has been dumbed down, and today's quants are little more than programmers. Is he right?